Hellevator

The song

‘Hellevator’ is a single Stray Kids released at noon on 1 November 2017. It is the group’s first release, and it came four months before the debut mini album I am NOT. When the song appeared, the name Stray Kids still belonged not to the group but to the boy-band selection programme JYP Entertainment and Mnet were making together.

The album introduction on Bugs says the song is one the cast of that programme wrote themselves, after Park Jin-young set them a first mission: finish a stage with a song of your own. The same text says the title joins the Korean words for hell and elevator, and carries the idea of children who have left home pushing through pain and effort toward the top. Bang Chan, Changbin and Han, who had been releasing mixtapes as 3RACHA, built a tight flow so that the dark mood and the melody would sit together, and varied the hook melody between the first and second verses. The music video went up on 7 October, ten days before the programme’s first broadcast.

Reviews

Mimyo of Idology (아이돌로지) took the song in the magazine’s new-release column, 1st Listen. He wrote that “the thoroughly grave mood is well expressed by the huge, heavy sound”, and read the group’s condition — a self-producing idol act still mid-debut — as the hint that explains the record. It “looks perfectly presentable and yet somehow shows that it has not quite ripened, and that has been made up for only slightly”, he wrote, which is “an interesting way of holding amateurism inside a commercial production”. He held back from a verdict on the group, saying it was “too early to judge what Stray Kids can do”, and closed: “seen within the frame of a new vision from one of the three big agencies, if they have taken musical growth as their subject then that is a welcome thing.”

Clash placed the song on the list its writers assembled in 2023 of the group’s defining songs. Chyenne Tatum went back to the trainees who made it: “Let’s take it back to where it all began, back to when the members of Stray Kids were all but hopeful rookies looking to leave their trainee days behind and finally make an impact in the world. ‘Hellevator’, the brooding hip-hop EDM track, was their promise to do just that.” Co-written and composed by a pre-debut 3RACHA, she wrote, the song “was much more than just a showcase of what the group was capable of; it was living and breathing proof, both to themselves and the world, that they were meant to shatter expectations, defy gravity, and reach for the stars beyond their wildest imaginations.”

Around it

Bang Chan, Changbin and Han kept the name 3RACHA as the group’s in-house production unit, and their names stay on the writing and composing credits of the releases that follow. That is why Tatum closed her entry by looking back at 2017 from where she stood in 2023: “Five years later, you can bet 2017 Stray Kids would never believe where they are now.”